Long ago and far away in Isan
Another gray day. Same as yesterday (52℉ and 30.3 in/Hg) no wind to speak of.
Mrs. Lake was my high school English teacher during my senior year. She had a moderate success in instilling a love of the language, but she did lead me to understand that I only liked poetry and literature when it was written in my own language. Reading translations of Dante and Dostoevsky that were assigned by Mrs. Lake was my first experience with “furriner writin’” (How does one use nested quote symbols anyway) and my position on this opinion has only hardened in the decades that have followed.
I was quite surprised and pleased when JMG announced that he was going the spen the next little while going over Yeat’s book “A Vision”. Yeats is the only Poet that I have ever spent money on. And to this day I still say that he is the only poet that I have allowed the dubious honor of enjoying most of the published works. Now there are some other poets that have rung the bell occasionally, but Yeats has by far (>75% by best guess analysis) of poetry and prose worth reading.
So I am going over the first three “chapters” of that book and trying to sort out what I should be learning/understanding and trying to sort out what other people are trying to learn/teach/propagandize. The Internet Archive has a text and scanned and OCR’ed versions available, but the OCR is riddled with OCR errors.
So I am going through the OCR and correcting the errors that I find and I will be publishing chapters as I complete them. But, heresy of heresies, when I find something that I don’t understand (Like where is Rapallo), I am going to stick in a wikipedia link.
Since I am completely blasé about my current coursework at the local diploma mill, I am going to take advantage of JMG and the internet to maybe learn something. You get to watch my struggle.
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